Non-Jacobians in the Schottky loci (Q1097928)

The author formerly showed that in the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties with a marked, non-zero point of order 2, the Schottky locus contains the Jacobian locus as an irreducible component. In the present paper, he shows that for the case genus \(\geq 5,\) the Schottky locus contains other components. An example is the locus \({\mathcal R}{\mathcal C}^ o\) of intermediate Jacobians of cubic threefolds with an ``even'' point of order 2 (for genus 5). In section 3 is proved that \({\mathcal R}{\mathcal C}^ o\) is contained in the Schottky locus, using theta maps and Prym varieties. In section 5 is proved that \({\mathcal R}{\mathcal C}^ o\) is a component of the Schottky locus, on the basis of the results on degeneration of cubic threefolds (Collino, van Geemen and Welters) and on Prym varieties (by the author, Beauville and Mumford). In section 6 several open problems are discussed.